Much of the best of IT has come to a point of reliability where the innovation can build on top of it rather than changing foundational layers. One of the most important moments in IT history was the announcement of the System/360.

James Stanger, CompTIA’s chief technology evangelist, explains how organic analogies like farming can illuminate the way to career success for millennial mainframers in the era Gartner describes as the “intelligent digital mesh.”

Instead of taking offense to the requirement that their security access be limited, take a fence and protect your key personnel, so they’ll still be there to help pick up the pieces if things do go wrong.

David Hyman, president, Center for Technology & Workforce Solutions, explains why millennial mainframers epitomize the professional skill set for reconciling the digital business world’s passion for invention with its angst over obsolescence.

Application modernization is about reworking or updating an application to better meet current needs. It’s such a simple idea—so, why is it challenging? Modernization can be perplexing for any number of important reasons.

The opportunities for the mainframe are unlimited, especially once you’ve understood the weaknesses, threats and strengths that fill in the context. Together, these factors make SWOT. This article conducts a SWOT analysis of the mainframe platform.

From humble beginnings as part of IBM's 1960s pioneering virtualization research project, VM's Conversational Monitor System (CMS) component was an experiment in OS design explicitly created as a single-user system; it provided what would later be called "personal computing."

Parallel Sysplex on IBM Z provides a highly reliable, redundant and robust environment by clustering together multiple z/OS systems with one or more coupling facilities to achieve near-continuous availability.

Backup isn’t archive. It's wonderful having robust near-term data storage recoverable from the worst possible disaster, error or malfeasance. But that's not the same as being able to recover and process your data in a month, year or decade.

New mainframers are finally beginning to arrive, and the mainframe shops that take fullest advantage of the mainframe’s strengths. So why aren’t more mainframers getting the word out about this important career choice?

So, you’re working on the mainframe platform. Some of you may have just started working with mainframes, and some of you might be experienced mainframers wanting to know more about specific topics or areas. Where do you start?

The mainframe community is still standing—though many of our mainframe colleagues have now begun to move on to other pastures. And thanks to initiatives such as zNextGen, a new generation on the mainframe is slowly beginning to form.

Joseph Gulla points out his most valuable and informative IT Trendz series—including IT consolidation, things they didn’t teach him in school and pivotal ideas in IT such as programming languages and middleware.

A multi-cloud strategy can provide a mechanism to migrate away from centralized IT to get to the cloud fast. It will also help integrate old and new platforms and leverage new cost and consumption models to achieve IT transformation.

After three decades, competing systems still haven’t caught up with what the mainframe was doing before it was a decade old. So why isn’t the mainframe universally perceived as the top computing platform?

When blockchain first emerged as the next big thing, it arrived as the technology behind bitcoin. At that time, blockchain was an x86 phenomenon. Today it has moved to Linux and runs on multiple platforms, including IBM Z and LinuxONE. From the start, blockchain naturally benefitted from the legendary scalability, reliability, security and flexibility of Z.

We want to see what artifacts the Destination z community has. We are looking for the most unique and the oldest artifacts, and will award a $50 prepaid Visa card to the first place winner in each category.

In a few months the mainframe turns 50. And what this means to IT buyers is that when you buy a mainframe, you’re buying 50 years of continuous improvements in performance and in manageability. A great example of these types of improvements can be found in one of the mainframe’s operating systems, z/OS.

An introduction to the concept of a process hub that uses IBM Business Process Manager and leverages IBM z/OS quality of service and collocation with systems of record to automate straight-through processing at the core of an enterprise for enhanced business agility.

It’s instructive to tour real-world and virtual computing museums, lovingly created and maintained by generations of professionals—many of whom designed, built and used the equipment written about and displayed.

The IBM zEnterprise BC12 is designed to be the entry point into enterprise computing for mid-sized organizations that are seeing growth in a variety of workloads. It provides availability, performance and security in data analytics, consolidation, virtualization, cloud solutions and mobile applications.

As part of IBM’s strategy for mainframe simplification and modernization, the User Experience team has studied the needs of our end users, both experienced and entry-level users. Resulting solutions have included: z/OS Management Facility, CICS Explorer, and IBM Explorer for z/OS V2.1.

The Warning Track implementation on the zEC12 and the Blocked Workload Support in z/OS provide mechanisms to clear lower-priority work out of the way without violating z/OS priority dispatching to any great extent.

zNextGen is doing its part in bridging the gap and erasing the differences between younger mainframe professionals and the veterans. This way, both groups can learn from each other and, ultimately, keep up the level of interest in mainframe careers.

IBM zAware is a program designed to automatically assist in mainframe troubleshooting by analyzing minute details in systems logs as well as other data relevant to systems and application performance to isolate problems and help discover the cause of anomalous behaviors.

No matter whether called conventional wisdom, best practices or wisdom of the ages—if not formalized, documented, preserved and passed on through generations of mainframers, lessons painfully learned are diluted and lost.

As every business is populated by consumers, the mobility wave washing over enterprise computing is a foregone conclusion. Sessions at SHARE in San Francisco reflected this sense of urgency for mainframers.

Included in last year’s announcement of the zEnterprise EC12, IBM introduced the optional Flash Express. So, what is Flash Express? It’s all about using solid-state drives to improve the performance of certain mainframe tasks.

With 53 percent of the vote, Philip Yeo’s mainframe advice dominated the field in the latest IBM Destination z Tips and Techniques Challenge. The Destination z community forum, the contest asked mainframers to share their best mainframe advice for a chance to win a $100 Visa gift card and an IBM Heritage T-shirt.

“Part of the challenge of mobile computing is describing the issues and opportunities,” says Ray Sun, SHARE marketing director. “And we believe SHARE as an organization has the experience and insight to lead the discussion of where mobility meets the mainframe and beyond to the whole of enterprise computing.”

A growing expectation among employees is the ability to use their own mobile devices for basic productivity tasks. Increasingly, they expect to be able to access sensitive corporate data via their smartphones.

BYOD is an irresistible trend. So it's worth exploring to learn what it can provide—not necessarily to economize but to make it secure, integrate it into mainstream IT and avoid costly technology dead ends.

Voting is now underway for the first Destination z Tips and Techniques contest. Out of nearly 40 entries, our expert panel selected three finalists. Now Destination z members have until May 18 to vote for their favorite.

The IT Systems Rationalization or Scorpion study produces a set of prioritized recommendations to assist a client in defining a new server-optimization strategy, identifies a more highly optimized alternative enterprise and/or distributed-server architecture, and evaluates the cost and benefits of those alternatives.

Even though the entry price is lower, the zEnterprise 114 is nevertheless a mainframe-caliber system that’s just as capable as its bigger counterparts when it comes to workload processing, security and reliability.

The majority of students are unaware of what an IBM System z mainframe is, much less how important the computing platform is to industry and to their daily life. They don’t realize the future employment opportunities for those who pursue an education that includes mainframe topics.

We use cookies to optimize your visit to our website. By visiting our website without changing your settings, you’re acknowledging your consent to receive cookies on our website. If you would like to change your cookie settings at any time please view our privacy policy for additional information. Agree